The Trump Presidency

thethe said:
Isn't the desire to want to take care of yourself without the assistance of others a good thing? Is that what you would expect a character trait of a "winner" be?
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Some of us don't have the same opportunities due to circumstances beyond our control. Such as being a triplegic from birth.
 
oh look at that

an i'm rubber you're glue defense. lol

again, i have said it's a coincide that of course you echo what's posted there etc
 
VirginiaBrave said:
Glad to hear it.
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But what I do not have sympathy for are those that can provide for themselves and do not. I don't expect everyone to make themselves upper middle class but it really is not that hard to get to a 50-70k threshold with a good work ethic after 5-10 years. People just make reapply bad choices in this world and it's not my responsibility to try and rectify that.
 
thethe said:
But what I do not have sympathy for are those that can provide for themselves and do not. I don't expect everyone to make themselves upper middle class but it really is not that hard to get to a 50-70k threshold with a good work ethic after 5-10 years. People just make reapply bad choices in this world and it's not my responsibility to try and rectify that.
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I think all of us, or nearly all of us, believe in a safety net. I can't imagine any moral person who can make an argument for the wealthiest country in the world NOT having one. The dispute is over how big of a net, how high off the ground it should go, and where it should be implemented.

My personal belief is that the net is too big, too high off the ground, and should be implemented no higher than the state level. I don't mind helping someone pay for heating in the winter if they need the help. But I shouldn't need to help them if they have a cable bill, a big cell phone bill, or a late model car.

Do national poverty guidelines make sense to anyone? Do we really believe that someone in San Francisco, LA, or NYC can survive on the same amount of income as someone in Wyoming, the Arctic Circle of Alaska, or south Georgia? That is absurd. This is an example of why I think the nation is too big for the federal government to implement a program like this. I also think the cultural differences between San Francisco and Calhoun, Georgia are great enough that they shouldn't be ruled by the same set of social laws. Most of governing should be done on the local level, and was intended by the Constitution to be done on the local level. Attempting to micromanage such a huge area guarantees the type of civil unrest we see today.
 
jpx7 said:
I think saying that we "are in the midst of a Holy war to save the west" is rhetoric that promotes violence—especially anti-Muslim violence.

Meanwhile: I ****ing love the West. I've spent the better part of my life studying western culture—from the Great Books core curriculum at university, where I was a Classics minor and, as an English major, spent a great of my time specializing in authors (the so-called High Modernists) whose work largely concerned celebrating the Occidental Inheritance. But even one of its most skilled and ardent acolytes, T. S. Eliot, tellingly ends his masterwork (The Waste Land) with a Sanskrit invocation (Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih). Indeed, one of the things that makes what we denote "Western Culture" so great is the it is agglutinative, that it incorporates (if too often by violent or economic force) alterity into its greater whole, that it allows itself to be beneficially added to and modified by the other.

To think of "The West", and western culture, as a pure and unchanged/unchanging entity is to not only embrace a fiction, but to deny that culture its real power and appeal, to rob it of its greatest strength. The West's better nature, such as it is, will prevail how it has always prevailed: by a lot of adsorption and a little absorption.
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JPX, I know you and I will almost always vote for different people, but man I enjoy your posts. Posts like the one above make me sure that if we could get media and politics out of government, we could get most people to agree to most things with a lot less of the current team competition mentality.
 
Jaw said:
I think all of us, or nearly all of us, believe in a safety net. I can't imagine any moral person who can make an argument for the wealthiest country in the world NOT having one. The dispute is over how big of a net, how high off the ground it should go, and where it should be implemented.

My personal belief is that the net is too big, too high off the ground, and should be implemented no higher than the state level. I don't mind helping someone pay for heating in the winter if they need the help. But I shouldn't need to help them if they have a cable bill, a big cell phone bill, or a late model car.

Do national poverty guidelines make sense to anyone? Do we really believe that someone in San Francisco, LA, or NYC can survive on the same amount of income as someone in Wyoming, the Arctic Circle of Alaska, or south Georgia? That is absurd. This is an example of why I think the nation is too big for the federal government to implement a program like this. I also think the cultural differences between San Francisco and Calhoun, Georgia are great enough that they shouldn't be ruled by the same set of social laws. Most of governing should be done on the local level, and was intended by the Constitution to be done on the local level. Attempting to micromanage such a huge area guarantees the type of civil unrest we see today.
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Well said. What we have now acts as an incentive not to work and that is harmful to everyone.
 
jpx7 said:
I think saying that we "are in the midst of a Holy war to save the west" is rhetoric that promotes violence—especially anti-Muslim violence.

Meanwhile: I ****ing love the West. I've spent the better part of my life studying western culture—from the Great Books core curriculum at university, where I was a Classics minor and, as an English major, spent a great of my time specializing in authors (the so-called High Modernists) whose work largely concerned celebrating the Occidental Inheritance. But even one of its most skilled and ardent acolytes, T. S. Eliot, tellingly ends his masterwork (The Waste Land) with a Sanskrit invocation (Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih). Indeed, one of the things that makes what we denote "Western Culture" so great is the it is agglutinative, that it incorporates (if too often by violent or economic force) alterity into its greater whole, that it allows itself to be beneficially added to and modified by the other.

To think of "The West", and western culture, as a pure and unchanged/unchanging entity is to not only embrace a fiction, but to deny that culture its real power and appeal, to rob it of its greatest strength. The West's better nature, such as it is, will prevail how it has always prevailed: by a lot of adsorption and a little absorption.
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Maybe the most substantive and useful thing I've ever read here.

Nothing irritates me more than someone masquerading as if wealth accrued by the holders of capital isn't done so on the backs of, and at the expense of, the workers who disproportionately don't see the benefits of their labor. That's why it's fair to redistribute.

But thanks for invoking the classic "loser" canard to discredit calls for stronger social supports. I simply cannot understand wanting to live in a world where everybody is reduced to "winners" and "losers", and winners are simply the rich (or rich-aspirant) amongst us. That's why I think capitalism is not only immoral, but suffocatingly short-sighted—to view human success as the capacity to produce fiat or commodity wealth, and accrue more to oneself than others can accrue to their selves, is about the most depressing worldview I can imagine.
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Though this is right up there.
 
I thought this might be a good place to share an inside scoop.

I have a friend in Germany who is extremely well connected to financial, political and intelligence circles there. Her father was a very high ranking official with their equivalent of the CIA and earlier in his career was a spy who operated on the eastern side of the iron curtain during the cold war.

The Germans are in possession of extremely derogatory information about the Donald that will bring him down. Most of it is financial in nature. But not all.
 
Runnin said:
If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer.
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It will good. That much I can assure you. The Germans have some ambivalence about being perceived as the party that brings him down. But really it just so happens that they are the ones best positioned to sift through the relevant information.
 
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